Stories I tell myself when I can't get to sleep at night

A Meandering Line in Cyclical Peregrination

A Lesser Day in the Book Notes series at the blog “Largehearted Boy.”

In A Lesser Day, the language is firmly rooted in the physicality of things; it takes location in space as its point of departure, as opposed to location in time, the other part of our wearisome ontological dichotomy. When I first began listening to Christian von der Goltz’s CD of solo piano improvisation, really listening to it, I was living in an eighth-floor loft on the Brooklyn waterfront with an amazing view of the Manhattan skyline; I was also in a state of semi-panic half the time, with the neurons in my brain zigzagging in unpredictable lightning bolts of recollection. Fleeting bits of remembered things were assaulting me everywhere I went; here I was, after a decade and a half in Berlin, reestablishing myself in the city of my birth, gradually peeling off the linguistic layers concealing my native accent, unraveling the German inflections that had crept in, and grappling with all manner of cultural shock—in short, I felt like an alien and was taken for the proverbial ride by the taxi drivers of my own home town.

Read the Book Notes to A Lesser Day and listen to an MP3 from Christian von der Goltz’s CD Wheels of Time: